Section: US & Canada

Germany is upping its contribution to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the Baltic state of Lithuania. This is a welcome development. The initial news came in October when Germany announced its commitment of Bundeswehr forces to Lithuania in 2017 as part of a NATO deterrence mission. Materially, the German deployment will be...

Seventeen masterpieces valued at some 17 million euros were returned to Italy from Ukraine Wednesday, with little more than scratches to show from their ordeal, after being stolen by masked and armed robbers from a Verona art museum last year …read more Source: U.S....

Britain and France want the United Nations Security Council to ban the sale or supply of helicopters to the Syrian government and to blacklist 11 Syrian military commanders and officials over chemical weapons attacks during the nearly six-year war. The pair have drafted a resolution, seen by Reuters on Wednesday, that also seeks to blacklist 10...

VERONA, Italy (AP) — Seventeen masterpieces valued at 17 million euros ($17.7 million) were returned to Italy from Ukraine on Wednesday after being stolen by masked, armed robbers from a Verona art museum last year. A guard at the museum, Pasquale Silvestri Riccardi, was convicted of armed robbery and sentenced to 10 years and eight months in...

Daniel DePetris responds to a new call from hawkish senators to send arms to Ukraine: It merely explains why the Russian government acted the way it did, and why further U.S. military assistance to the Ukrainian security forces would be ill-advised. In fact, one could make a convincing case that providing hundreds of millions of dollars in...

The United States is denying claims made by a Russian spokesman that the two countries had all but frozen communication channels, saying both sides were still engaged. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told Mir TV earlier Wednesday, that “almost every level of dialogue” had been severed with the United States. But State Department...

The first several months of a new administration are inevitably seen as an opening for those who hope to influence the White House over the next four years. The Senate Ukraine Caucus—a bipartisan group of senior lawmakers who have lobbied intensively for a closer U.S.-Ukraine relationship—hopes to take advantage of this sensitive period, in which...

The New York Times has a good look at Rex Tillerson, Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, and his rather rapid shift of opinion on whether Russia was a place with “no respect for the rule of law” or whether Vladimir Putin was a super-awesome business buddy once you discounted all those murdered journalists and civil...

Photo by Thierry Ehrmann Leila al-Shami, co-author of Burning Country, a writer who has worked with human rights movements in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East, gave this interview to Ilya Matveev and Gabriel Levy on 29 November for OpenLeft (before the fall of Aleppo to the government forces). It sheds some light on the social and...